User:SleepDrifter/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
2008 Cameroonian anti-government protests

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because I am interested in Cameroon political life. In addition, as a French and English speaker, I believe i am in a good position to find literature about it.

It matters to work more on articles about the politics of African countries because it is often less documented than other regions of the world. With regard to this specific subject, it is important to evaluate it, I believe, because, being a recent event in Cameroonian history, it is possible that new sources analyzing it and its importance for Cameroonian politics have been released. Yet all references in this article are dated 2008.

My first impression is that the article already has some enough content to provide a good frame to gain knowledge on what happened during these events. However, the organization of the article could be improved, and deeper political and historical analysis on these events and their significance within Cameroonian political history could be added relying on more scholarly sources.

Lead section
The introductory sentence effectively describes the article's topic. However, I find the terms " Cameroon's biggest cities" imprecise. It would be nice to put in brackets the cities we are talking about.


 * Another idea for the rest of the article could be to introduce a section telling what were the major events in each city with a division by city.

The lead section includes a brief description of the information in all of the major sections. However, I find it a bit overly detailed. Maybe, we could drop some of the information. However, it does not introduce information that is not present in the article which is a good thing.

Content
I think the article does a good job introducing us to this topic and highlighting the main elements to understand the dynamics at play here. A problem I found, however, is that all of the references are date 2008, which means that the article maybe lacks distance with the events. Adding some scholarly sources and their analysis of these events could provide the reader with more perspective as to the deeper significance of these protests related to Cameroonian history and subsequent developments. I believe the sections "Causes" and "Aftermath" could be especially improved.

I like that the article addresses a topic that is related to African politics which are notably less documented in Wikipedia than European or North American politics for instance.

Tone and Balance
Evaluating the article's neutrality would probably more research on this topic. A first impression is that the article manages to stay fairly neutral in the depiction of the events by sourcing every time it describes a specific event, and by giving accounts from different sources.

When certain claims are made by some of the protagonists of the events in the article, they are often counterbalanced by the claims of the other party, which is a good way to ensure a neutrality between each standpoint.

I do not think the article try to persuade the reader in favor of one particular position. I, however, think that the article could do more to counterbalance claims made by the government. For instance, this claim "The government accused the mayor of the Njombe-Penja Council of leading a group of demonstrators in an attack on a gendarme station in his town. The mayor was later suspended for this act and for alleged mismanagement of council funds" should be complemented with another viewpoint from non-governmental sources, and by the defendents.

Sources and References
Most facts are backed up by a reliable secondary source of information. The sources are, however, not thorough: they do not reflect at all the current available scholarly litterature on the events. In addition, all the sources date from 2008.

The sources are varied and rely on various media outlets, and reports from international organizations's organs. It is hard to tell, with my knowledge, if they include enough marginalized individuals and viewpoints.

Too fiew peer-reviwed articles are used as sources however.

The few links I tested were working, except for "Le Sdf appelle à une journée de deuil national. Donat SUFFO, 16 April 2008. Le Messager, Yaounde. Archived 13 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine"

Organization and writing quality
The writing is efficient. Concise, easy to read and understand. No mistakes or typos noted.

I think that the organization could be improved. For instance, the section "Death and damages" could be put in the same section as "Aftermath". The section could be named "Consequences" or "Outcomes".

Images and Media
The article does not include any image. It could clearly be improved in that regard, protests being visually charged events. A map with the location main protest could also be added.

Talk page discussion
The talk page discussion unfortunately does not discuss any substantial aspects of the article, but rather problems of external links and related modifications.

Overall impressions
I think the article is at a good starting point. Most of the informations it tells are well-delivered and sourced. It is written concisely and gives a good account of the events.

Now, I believe it can be improved by adding new scholarly literature to go into a deeper analysis of the these events' importance. It would also benefit from light reorganization of the section to make it more easy to read.

I would say that this article is at an intermediary stage and could use more attention and research to document it and add more substance.